One of the principal subjects which engaged Maitland's mind during these years was the history of the Corporation. Problems connected with the growth and definition of the Corporate idea had furnished the theme of the Ford Lectures and a course upon the Corporation in English law was delivered in Cambridge in the Autumn Term of 1899. It was a subject from which Maitland derived deep and peculiar delight. It brought into play the full range of his faculties, for it was at once metaphysical, legal and historical. It was associated with the enquiries which he had already been making into municipal origins, and into the law of the medieval Church, while, at the same time, it was connected with some living and familiar developments of modern law, with those corporate groups which, during the later half of the nineteenth century "had been multiplying all the world over at a rate far outstripping the increase of natural persons." Trades unions and joint-stock companies, chartered boroughs and medieval universities, village communities and townships, merchant guilds and crafts, every form of association known to medieval or modern life came within his view, as illustrating the way in which Englishmen attempted "to distinguish and reconcile the manyness of the members and the oneness of the body." An enquiry of this kind was something entirely new in England. Here lawyers had accepted from the Canonists the view that the Corporation was a fiction of the law created by the authoritative act of the State. A mindless thing, "incapable of knowing, intending, willing, acting, distinct from the living corporators who are called its members," the Corporation is and must be the creature of the State. "Into its nostrils the State must breathe the breath of fictitious life, for otherwise it would be no animated body but individualistic dust." _Solus princeps fingit quod in rei veritate non est._ Such a theory was, as Maitland pointed out, likely to play into the hands of the paternal despot. The Corporation so conceived--and this is how not only Savigny but Blackstone also conceived it--was no subject for liberties and franchises and rights of self-government. It was but "a wheel in the State machinery." And yet in England, where the Concession theory of the Corporation was received without challenge, there had certainly not been less of autonomy and free grouping in guilds and fellowships than elsewhere. The secret of this apparent contradiction, between a theory which made corporateness the creature of a sovereign authority and a practice which enabled permanent groups to be freely formed without such authority, was to be found in a legal conception peculiar to England, the conception of the Trust. "Behind the screen of trustees and concealed from the direct scrutiny of legal theories, all manner of groups can flourish: Lincoln's Inn, or Lloyds, or the Stock Exchange, or the Jockey Club, a whole presbyterian system or even the Church of